new plans

MoviePass has had a tough time recently, between literally running out of money, suffering an effective 99.999% loss in adjusted stock value from last year's peak, and trying to cut member benefits even as it increases prices. But the company is still taking its future quite seriously. In an unexpected move, it has decided not to increase subscription prices. Instead, it'll be switching to a three movie per month maximum, with a $5 discount for any tickets beyond that. Peak Pricing and Ticket Verification—two common customer complaints—will also be axed.

The wireless industry here in the US is definitely changing, if but slowly - very slowly. T-Mobile was the first to start some new trends, notably doing away with data caps. Users who exceeded their data allotment for the billing cycle would be throttled back, not cut off. Sprint followed suit in October of last year. Recently, Verizon Wireless finally caught on and added free throttling to its pre-paid plans and also to its post-paid plans for a small monthly fee. Now, AT&T joins the fray with its announcement today of Mobile Share Advantage.

Starting August 21, AT&T customers (including those on the Business plans) will no longer have to fear overage charges.

Republic Wireless is changing up the way it charges for data. Today the company has unveiled its new refund plan that encourages customers to use less cellular data and save money.

Here's how the Republic Refund Plan works. First you pick a base plan. $5 limits you strictly to Wi-Fi. $10 gets you unlimited talk and text over a cellular network.

Then you add on however much data you think you need. Only want half a gigabyte? That's $7.50. 1GB is $15. 3GB goes for $45. If you end up needing more, you can purchase another allotment at any time. Whatever you don't use will turn into a refund credit that gets applied to next month's bill.

Verizon Wireless isn't the carrier you go to in order to save money. It's not the one you turn towards for friendly customer service or open devices. It's the one you use because, frankly, its network is larger than everyone else's. And starting tomorrow, you will have a little bit more choice in how much of it you use.

The carrier doesn't offer unlimited data, but it's now rolling out new tiers for people who know they tend to consume a lot of bits but don't want to pay for 20GB. A new 6GB More Everything plan will start at $70 a month (in addition to your $40 line access fee).

Among postpaid plans, shared data has become par for the course. Your family (or "family") gets a certain allocation of data that everyone is allowed to use. This way instead of everyone getting 2GB of 3G/4G LTE, with a few people hardly touching their allotment and others burning through theirs in a week, the heavy users can have at the otherwise unused data as well.

Now Virgin Mobile is bringing the same treatment to prepaid, no-contract plans. In a deal that's available exclusively at Walmart, the Sprint subsidiary is letting customers sign up for a "Data Done Right" plan for roughly $30 a line.

As one of Sprint's prepaid mobile offerings, Boost Mobile's big draw is that it's affordable. But competition has ramped up as of late, and now the carrier has rolled out three new "Monthly Unlimited Select" service plans to shake things up. The offerings range from $40 to $60, and all are technically unlimited, only not really.

Taking a closer look, the lowest plan offers 500MB of data. Users who exceed that amount then find themselves throttled down to 2G speeds for the remainder of the month. To make matters worse, all video streaming may be limited to 3G, regardless of how much of your allotment is left.

The concept of shared data plans are nothing new, but not every carrier out there offers one. Yet as more people get their first smartphones, mobile providers want a way to keep the entire family tied to one carrier and to limit how much strain they're putting on the network. So the nation's fifth-largest carrier, US Cellular, has decided to introduce its own shared data plan, driving a stake into the heart of its previous unlimited data plan in the process.

These new plans are available now for consumers and businesses. The former can pool together up to 10 devices, whereas the latter can select up to 25.

Earlier this week we caught wind of Sprint's upcoming plans to jump on the accelerated upgrade bandwagon already occupied by T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon; and now it's been made official. The rules surrounding the Sprint One Up program aren't that different from what's being offered elsewhere, but it does come at the lowest cost. If you're fine with committing yourself to the Sprint network and want to make the leap to a new phone each year, you can soon do so for $65 a month.

If you haven't kept up with these new annual upgrade plans - and I wouldn't blame you if you hadn't, considering these plans are more about locking you in than saving you money - here's how it works.

Update: Sprint has officially announced these new plans as of tonight.

As you may have already heard, Sprint is gearing up to put some new plans called Unlimited, My Way and My All-In in motion. From what we've seen, the new plans likely won't replace the old Everything plans, but they are definitely different in essentially every way. And for some, they may even be cheaper.

Three UK, the mobile network provider in Britain popular for its unlimited data plans without fair usage policies, has rolled out two new plans for their smartphone customers today which promise fear-free mobile internet.

The first plan, Essential, starts at £15 and provides customers with a choice of 100, 300 or 500 minutes per month as well as a 250MB data allowance. The idea behind this tariff is to stop bill shock, as your data will be cut off automatically when you reach your monthly data quota. If you'd like to purchase more data, you can choose to pay an additional £2 for a further 250MB or pay £5 extra for all-you-can-eat data for the rest of the month, which doesn't have any fair usage policies applied to it.